Crank the volume

The Beastie Boys were one of the first high-profile groups to release an anti-Iraq war song, "In a World Gone Wrong," (free download) deriding Bush's "midlife crisis war."

Saul Williams shouts out a "Pledge of Resistance" in his poetry slam rap on "Not in Our Name" (free download): "We pledge resistance, we pledge alliance with those who have come under attack for voicing opposition to the war or for their religion or ethnicity."

Ex-Rage Against the Machine frontman Zach De La Rocha teams up with DJ Shadow, and turns his rage on Bush in the fierce, frightening "March of Death" (free download): "Here it comes the sound of terror from above/ He flex his Texas twisted tongue/ The poor lined up to kill in desert slums/ For oil that burns beneath the desert sun/ Now we spit flame to flip this game/ We are his targets taking aim."

Sonic Youth is equally fierce on the brutal "Youth Against Fascism" (free download): "Yeah the president sucks/ He's a war pig fuck/ His shit is out of luck/ It's the song I hate."

If the anger is getting to you, try the relatively easygoing "Jacob's Ladder" (free download), by Chumbawamba. That the song is so smooth and musically genial makes its eventual indictment of Bush all the more shocking and effective: "Puppy dog leader/ Sooner or later/ We'll dig up your cellar/ And try you for murder."

Jonatha Brooke wrote "War" (free download) just after the Gulf War, but gave it to Protest Records to post as part of their anti-Iraq war campaign, feeling it was just as relevant today in its description of America's bullying relationship with the rest of the world: "It's the American way, the new world order/ We hold these truths to be self evident/ In the American day you must give and I shall take/ And I will tell you what is moral and what is just/ Because I want, because I will/ Because I can, so will I kill."

Le Tigre, the queens of agit-pop, have released a video for their song "New Kicks" (free video download), an anthemic dance-pop track that uses samples of antiwar speeches by Susan Sarandon, Al Sharpton and others.

Marc Anthony Thompson (aka Chocolate Genius) covers Jimi Hendrix's "Bold as Love" (free download) in a live performance at Tonic, and turns it into an anti-Bush song with the simplest of substitutions ("Just ask the axis" becomes "Go back to Texas"). Oh yeah, that's me quietly playing the piano in the background.

If you like protest of a more abstract variety, try George W. Bush and Matt Rogalsky's "Two Minutes Fifty Seconds Silence for the USA" (free download), which comes with this artist's statement by Rogalsky: "A distillation of George W. Bush's address to the world on March 17 2003, in which he gave Saddam Hussein 48 hours to get out of town. Using my own software, I removed his voice from the 13+ minute speech, leaving only his 'silences.' The thumping sounds you hear, which a number of people have taken to be a reference to 'drums of war,' are simply the reverberations of Bush's voice inside the White House."

Next Page: "The most potent and intense of all the protest songs I found"

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